

You would like your examiners to feel as comfortable as possible while their eyes are traversing the many, many pages of your thesis, so maximising legibility and readability is a good idea.

The other problem with choosing a sans serif for your body text is that if you want passages in italics (for example, lengthy participant quotes) often this will be displayed as slanted letters, rather than as a true italic font. Lacking the little projecting bits (serifs) at the end of characters makes Calibri and its many friends, such as Arial, Helvetica and Verdana, look smoother and clearer on a screen, but generally makes them less readable than a serif typeface when used for printed text. With the release of Office 2007, the default became a sans serif typeface called Calibri. For many years, it was the default body text for Microsoft Word. Times New Roman is the standard choice for academic documents, and the thesis preparation guidelines of some universities stipulate its use. Just bear in mind that there is no need to immerse yourself so deeply in the topic that you start quibbling about whether it’s a font or a typeface that you are choosing. But as someone who edits theses for a living, I think a bit of time spent on fonts is part of the process of buffing and polishing what is, after all, one of the most important documents you will ever produce. Her website is Īrguably, this question is a classic time waster and the student who poses it should be told to just get on with writing up their research.
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She occasionally teaches academic writing at the University of New England and often edits academic theses, articles and reports. This post is by DrJanene Carey, a freelance writer and editor based in Armidale NSW.
